Or what about THIS terminology?

"Extended suicide"--they call it extended suicide. Since the father sees the wife and children as his property/extensions of himself - to him it is just part of killing himself.

A term that clearly reflects the return to the Dark Ages of women's rights--when a woman had absolutely NO rights. Everything belonged to the man--her father or her son; everyone catered to the man; he made all the decisions, even life and death; a woman owned only the clothes on her back, and in some states not even those. And in some countries, young wives were thrown onto funeral pyres with a husband's body. History tells stories of women walking away, stark naked, from abusive relationships they could no longer bear.

Progress? Financial, but limited. Legally the right to abuse has been taken from husbands and fathers--but this also is limited by failure of the law to respond. "There's nothing we can do," say police officers to a woman with a restraining order. "He hasn't DONE anything to you yet." So she sits...and she waits...until he kills her. And THEN the police step in and an attempt is made at establishing some kind of justice--when it's really to late for any kind of justice.

"Familicide?"

Familicide, the act of killing one's family, is more common among men than women and usually involves a gun, said Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

What a horrible concept. If a man decides to kill himself, I guess that is his right. But why does he have to take his family along with him--his entire family, both wife and children--courtesy of a carefully-placed bullet or two or however many he decides he needs.

An Open Response to Hate Mail from Tampa, Florida

Anyone who reads what I've been writing about Elsa Newman, knows by now that I firmly believe two things:
1. Elsa Newman is innocent and unjustly imprisoned at Maryland's Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.
2. Newman's sons were in the past and may still be the objects of sexual molestation, by their father, as well as suffering virtually every other kind of abuse: physical, mental, emotional, verbal and spiritual, at their father's hands.

I believe the first because I have spent more than a year researching and writing about the Newman case, and I see so many holes in the prosecution case that sometimes I fear I could fall into one of them and get lost. This woman is clearly innocent and needs to have someone come forward and take on her case and get her out of prison.

I believe the second because I have spent more than a year researching and writing about the Newman case, and not only did the boys themselves disclose their father's abuse--to friends, to their treating psychiatrist, to law enforcement and to medical personnel, but I have even found a witness to the abuse, as well as reports of said abuse, filed by said treating psychiatrist.

I now have a third reason to believe that Ms. Newman's two sons were indeed the victims of molestation and other abuses: I have become the recipient of absolutely foul hate mail, proclaiming me a fat [true] liar [not true]. The writer of this hate mail claims to be ******* Slobodow, Ms. Newman's elder son. I am not sure this is true, although it is possible. It has been known in the past--whether because of Stockholm syndrome or whatever other reason: fear, coercion or what-have-you--for victims to side with their abuser.

If the author of my personal hate mail is indeed *******, then methinks the young man doth protest overmuch. It would have been sufficient to call me a liar once or twice--but I have received some twenty [ok, I really don't know for sure; it might be more than that...but who counts their hate mail?] comments and emails belittling me, calling me names, saying I'm a liar.

If the author is Arlen Slobodow, then methinks the man doth protest overmuch. It would still have been sufficient to make one or two comments. But now? Virtually every time I post I get a "hate mail" response. Hmmmmmm. Why would a person protest so much, unless the accusation is true?

Now the author has threatened me: he says he could post a video on his YouTube channel, so I could see him saying the words himself. Hmmmmmm. More overmuch of protestation.

Just so you can see what I'm talking about? Here's an example: first the hate mail; then my response.



----- Original Message -----
From: herbert slobodow
To: pugbubbe@earthlink.net
Sent: 1/24/2009 9:17:34 PM
Subject: "responce to yours"

No, you are not a feminist, feminist is a movement that actually benifited society, not tried to tear down the other branch, like you try to do to men.

You dont know what you are even talking about, if i have to ill post a youtube video of me talking about your crazy self, only fear of mine is that the little hits my channel gets may have to read your black blog of smears my mom has you write, i dont really care, any one with common sence knows your completely insane

And how can you talk if you have no idea about this situation, you are completely mistaken, hope your sane enough to understand, doubt it but ill say it one more time, YOU ARE WRITING FOR ONE OF THE SICKEST MOST DISPEAKABLE MOTHERS IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

she manipulated me and my brother just so she wins custody and has the house to her and her friendshe manipulated her best friend into trying to kill my dadshe manipulated you to cyber bully me and lie about my dad and try to free this derranged woman who calls herself momshe used to scream at me, drop me off when i didnt want to do what she said at a place i was unfamiliar with and come back 2 mins laterAnd since feminism wanted equal treatment of woman the only thing that could be radical would be the higher treatment of woman, sexism,get your teminology right "teacher" lol need ice for the burn?
January 24, 2009 8:44 PM
******* said...
but srsly you cant be that lost to not understand anything i just said and ignore me shes pretending i dont exist because i am an obstical in her crazy world revolving around her idea that all men are evil and all woman are innocent, shes completely lost all touch of sanitymaybe she really is just "moms" responce to my blog, i mean she did say she writes for herand i could see mom being spite full towards men, because the way mom talks about my grand pa herbert sounds like she was abused by him

AND THEN MY RESPONSE TO "MR. SLOBODOW"--whichever one of them is writing this

You know, Mr. Slobodow--It might be a good idea if you made a video for YouTube. It might be a good idea if I could see and hear the words coming from your own mouth.

Then, instead of believing that Mr. Slobodow the elder is actually stooping to writing these and thus ruining his son's reputation, I could believe that Mr. Slobodow the younger is being forced to write them, under threat of god-only-knows what torments from Mr. Slobodow the elder--and thus ruining his own reputation.

OMG--I forgot to tell you! And it's so important, too! I've located a witness who can back up Ms. Newman's claims that Arlen Slobodow molested his sons sexually, as well as abusing them physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and spiritually. There was at least one individual who witnessed and may actually have participated in abuse. And there are two other potential witnesses. I am in the process of looking the other two up now.

Have a good day, sir--but brace yourself, because the truth will out.

Aine--activist and advocate for battered/abused/molested children
and the mothers who try to protect them
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

Unjust Imprisonment--And It's Not Just Elsa Newman

The deeper I plunge into research about the Elsa Newman case, the more disgusted awe I find myself feeling--as I come daily to awareness of new cases of unjust incarceration. Here is another one. I have simply copied and pasted what was sent to me. Please notice the petition link at the bottom of this entry. Please sign it and pass it on.


Please assist in making this case public. Forward information to at least 10 people. Request that they do the same.

IN THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPIScott County

• Jamie and Gladys Scott – Black sisters - were convicted in 1994 of armed robbery. 9, 10 or 11 dollars was stolen. The Scott sisters were sentenced to double life.• No one was injured, murdered or, hospitalized in this alleged robbery• At the advice of their attorney(s) – the sisters did not testify in their own behalf. 5 Witnesses testified for the state. All gave conflicting stories regarding this alleged robbery but, All Witnesses stated that Jamie and Gladys Had No Involvement in the robbery – testimony in lower court.

• There are three Signed affidavits stating that Jamie and Gladys had nothing to do with the crime. The lower court did not hear these affidavits.

• One affidavit states that this was a fight which Sheriff Marvin Williams -fabricated- into an armed robbery.

• Witnesses (perpetrators) were coerced, threatened and harassed, the transcripts state that sheriff told witnesses they would be sent to Parchman, the notorious penitentiary, "to be made out of a woman" if they did not lie on The Scott Sisters.

• The sisters were framed because of the Rasco Family name. Their cousin turned FBI informant sent a high white sheriff to prison for five years. Their father became involved in illegalities for which he paid the sheriff (an additional sheriff) off – for protection against the revenue men and to remain out of prison. When the father could or would, no longer pay the escalating bribe money, he was told that they would get him – even if it meant his daughters.

• A robbery of a restaurant occurred – two Black boys committed the robbery. The sheriff attempted to coerce the restaurant owners (two white women) to lie and say that Jamie and Gladys robbed the restaurant. He wanted to pin those charges on the sisters as well. White women – one dead the other severe dementia in nursing home.

• Sisters have been in prison 14 years. Their mother struggled to raise their children (one born in prison) and now their grand children.

• Judge Marcus Gordon presided over this case.

Link To Petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Free-Jamie-Gladys/index.html
Link To Transcripts
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10571890/Jamie-and-Gladys-Scott-Transcript
Interview With Sister Sankofa Uhuru
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/spokentruth/2009/01/16/Black-Unity-1
Blogspot - Donations are needed
www.freejamieandgladyscott.blogspot.com
Flyer – Please Print and Circulate

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10595297/Free-Jamie-and-Gladys-Scott-Flyer

Why Aren't People Signing This Petition?

If Elsa Newman were a polar bear, floating out to sea on a runaway ice floe…

…If she were a wolf, threatened by Sarah Palin’s “wolf’s-paw bounty”…

…If she were a penguin, somehow stranded in the Sahara desert…

…I would have thousands of signatures on her petition. Animal rights petitions garner such huge numbers of signatures.

But Elsa Newman is none of these. Instead, she is a merely a mother unjustly imprisoned at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.

And the last time I looked at Care2 Petition Site:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

there were a mere 165 people who had signed the petition asking Governor O’Malley of Maryland to appoint an unbiased and open-minded investigator to check out the circumstances of Newman’s imprisonment, as well as to investigate the claims of her sons that they were molested by their father, who now has physical custody of the boys, by virtue of Newman’s imprisonment for a crime committed by someone else.

Where are all the people who care about the wolves and the bears and the penguins?
Won’t some of you work up the courage to sign this mother’s petition, as well as the animal rights petitions?

Yes…I know there is risk involved. OMG! What if you sign a petition and it has no effect? What if it turns out that the author of the petition—that would be me, the little, old lady retired schoolteacher who happens to believe Elsa Newman is innocent and also believes that her children were telling the truth when they said they were and probably still are being molested by their own father---what if that little, old lady turns out to be WRONG? And your name is there in black and white? And you’ve made a mistake by trying to gain attention and justice for this woman?

What if? Well, if you are worried about that, then please note the feature that allows you to keep your name anonymous on the net. You still have to write it in the appropriate place to sign. You still have to use your real email. But you can keep everything secret, and the site will just post “anonymous” and where you are from.

On the other hand, what if I am RIGHT?

What if you have turned your back on an innocent woman?

What if you have turned your back on her molested sons?

What if you have turned your back on the fact that there is a child molester living in Tampa, Florida—who may well be preying on other children in addition to his own?

What then will you say?

Why Did the Sinsiter Grinch Steal Christmas?

How the Sinister Grinch Stole all the Christmases—
and a whole bunch of other stuff that went right back up the chimney
with the Christmases!—in smoke.



I sort of hate to admit this, but poking around on the internet is one of the interesting things I do with life. It smacks so much of snooping. However, I also must tell you, no matter how much I hate admitting it, that in this poking/snooping fashion, I do come across some fascinating items.

Thus it was that I came upon a Grinch who would put all other Grinches to shame. This Grinch is so sinister in nature that he makes the original Dr. Seuss Grinch look like Jolly Old Saint Nicholas himself.

Now I know we’ve all heard of Grinches, and we know what they do. But this Grinch? Well…judge for yourself.

Unlike your average, nasty Grinch, this Sinister Grinch began long before Christmas. The Sinister Grinch was not to be content with stealing a major holiday from the Whos of Whoville, as did the Dr. Seuss Grinch. Oh no!

The Sinister Grinch would steal a mother…friends—in the form of Florida’s Big Brother program…a summer camp experience… Christmas…and normal childhoods from his own two children.

I could begin most anywhere, I suppose. But we’re talking Grinch here—so let’s start with Christmas.

This past Christmas—2008—Elsa Newman #921975 at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup applied to a program called “Angel Tree.” Angel Tree is a program which provides Christmas gifts—beautiful clothes and toys--to children of prisoners. Newman’s application was logical enough: prisoners make a mere pittance for their assigned jobs in prison; she did not have enough money to send her sons the Christmas gifts she dreamed of sending them. So she applied, and her application was accepted.

Then came the long-awaited report from Oasis Christian Church in Tampa, the organization which had taken responsibility for seeing that Newman’s children would receive presents from her. “Dear Caring Parent,” the letter began. And it continued in this vein: we are sorry to inform you that although the gifts you had requested for your sons were purchased and wrapped and we attempted delivery, the primary caregiver refused to accept the gifts, and we were unable to place them with your sons. We know this must be a disappointment to you. We will be praying for you and for your children. That is all we can do at this time.

Well…having found that bit of Sinister Grinchiness, I decided to check further, wondering if this father was depriving his young “Who” children of other things besides Christmas.

And sure enough, there is more.

Newman contacted the Big Brother League in the hope of finding older friends who would mentor her children, help with homework, take them to ball games—whatever kind of positive activities the Big Brother League has created and loves to provide for children who have only one parent available to them. Representatives from the Big Brother League actually went to the prison to interview Newman, and on behalf of her children, she signed up.

Representatives of the Big Brother League then contacted the Sinister Grinch. He hung up on them. They followed that contact by contacting Dr. Joy Silberg, because of the trouble with the Sinister Grinch. Now remember, The Big Brother League is a national organization of considerable repute. It may well have been a bit difficult for them to understand that there might be a “Who” child with a parent who would not welcome their efforts. Dr. Silberg gave the Big Brother League advice on how to approach the parent. When representatives of the Big Brother League called again on the Sinister Grinch, he informed them—rather rudely, I think—that they should “butt out” of his business. The little “Whos” were his problem, not theirs.

Yikes! When I found this one, I found it, also, hard to believe. But there was more to come.

In the State of Massachusetts, there is a non-profit organization which specializes in helping the children of political prisoners. Wondering whether she would meet their standards, Newman contacted this organization also. What she wanted from them? Scholarships to summer camp for her two sons.

The Newman family has a tradition of sending their children to camp Airy. Elsa attended the camp as a child, as did her older sister and brother. It is a camp of highest quality, one which has traditions of its own, and one worth every cent of the rather expensive fees.

This Massachusetts non-profit apparently decided that Elsa Newman does indeed qualify as a political prisoner. They offered scholarships to the camp for both her sons.

But the Sinister Grinch could hardly wait, it seems, to put a stop to this.
His “Who” children, tradition or no tradition, would not be attending Camp Airy. And his ex-wife a political prisoner? Well! She wasn’t getting away with that! Not while he had anything to say about it!

Two more items are noteworthy here: 1) It is the Sinister Grinch himself who has seen to it that the boys have only one available parent, and 2) reports back from the “Who” children—via blog or blog comments or email--are couched in the same terminology that the Sinister Grinch himself has been using for some eight or so years now, in his attempts to separate the boys from their mother or from anyone else who shows and interest in trying to help them.

Exactly how does that play out? Well…it was the Sinister Grinch who set up the prosecution case against Elsa Newman when he made the 9-1-1 call on the night he was injured. “My wife,” he said, “sent someone to try to kill me.” Had that been true, of course, there was no way the Grinch could have known it. Not only that, but this particular Grinch was one of the main prosecution witnesses, fictionalizing a story of “twisted sisters” who had somehow become so interdependent that they had conspired together and sent the one to the house to try to kill him, while Newman herself was out of the state.

You realize, of course, that if Margery Landry had, in fact, wanted to kill the Grinchly Slobodow, all she had to do was sneak into his room, put a bullet in his head, and sneak out again. She was already, undiscovered, inside the home.

And the terminology question? From the beginning, the Sinister Grinch has never expressed the possibility that he is even slightly offended by accusations that he is/has been molesting his children. Wouldn’t you think that an innocent man would have something—some tiniest thing-- to say in protest and regret concerning false accusations?

Nada!

Rather this Grinch has chosen to call his ex-wife names. He has chosen to label those who disagree with him, using most unpleasant appellations, rather than trying to reach out and touch some kind of proof of his innocence, rather than showing that he gives a damn—which, of course, he does not. This Grinch apparently believes he is right and the world is wrong.

He has called Newman’s advocates her victims, manipulated to do her will. Really? Not on your life!

The Grinch is the manipulator. He fashions his family and those around him into his own image and uses them as if they were puppets.

He has called me the “new Margie,” as if I am somehow a danger to him in Tampa, Florida, from my tiny home in SW Washington State.

He has thought of a thousand ways to sever contact between his “Who” sons and their mother. He wrote to the prison warden to insist that she not allow Newman to communicate with the school her children attend. Is there something wrong, Mr. Grinch, with your “Who” children’s schools and teachers coming to know the real Elsa Newman?

When Elsa places phone calls to her children, which she is allowed to do, although Mr. Grinch is supervises said calls and cuts them off at his whim, she may be allowed to talk to only one child, yet she hears things like this just before the call is over and they are cut off: a whispered, “Mom…it’s me…I’m hiding under the table so Dad won’t see. I love you.”

And the labels that his son, Herbie—or whoever is writing in Herbie’s name—uses today are exactly the same labels used by Stacey Blondes Talbott. Talbott was the Grinch’s attorney at the custody trial and she stood by him during the criminal trial, when the Grinch was writing material for her, so he would be certain that the mother of his children would be tucked safely away in prison, where she could not intervene between him and his children. They are the same labels used by the prosecution. They are the same labels used by guardian ad litem, Alan Town.

They are the same labels spouted from the mouth of the Sinister Grinch himself for the past eight years.

Good god! Wouldn’t you think that, given eight years to think about it, even the worst of Grinches—which this one is—could come up with something newer than “liar…liar…pants on fire!”

So you see, not only has the Sinister Grinch stolen Christmas…stolen camp experiences…stolen friends that might have been provided through the Big Brother organization, but he has stolen childhood and its rights and privileges from his own children, children who have said he is molester, abuser and exploiter of their young selves.

Sooooo...why DID this Sinister Grinch steal Christmas and all that other stuff? Could it be? Could it possibly be that he really DOES have something to hide? Hmmmmmm.

Before the Elsa Newman Case--What?

If you read what I have been writing here, you know that I focus primarily on the case of Elsa Newman, unjustly incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup. You know that I also focus on the plight of her children, who live with a father about whom they have disclosed unspeakable abuses--and no one in authority seems to give a damn, either about this mother or about the plight of her children.

There may be a thousand reasns why Elsa Newman is in prison, none of them valid. There are a thousand holes in the prosecution case, none of which the defense team apparently observed or ripped into.

There have been cursory investigations of molestation charges against the boys' father. There was one psychiatrist who reported abuse. There were medical doctors who observed the results of the abuse. There were police officers to whom the boys disclosed the molestation, but apparently nobody believed them. One of Elsa's sons even chastised her thus: "Mom! You said if we told the truth, the court would believe us. But they don't!"

No, little boy, you were right when you said the court didn't believe you when you told the truth. They only believe you when you lie, under threat of further abuse from your father.

Why? What is going on in America that a child telling the truth about being molested is not believed? He must lie and say there was/is no abuse--and only then will the courts believe him. Then they will send his mother to prison. Then they will place him in the custody of the man he accused of abuse, exploitation and molestation.


Today I received the following information in an email. It offers an interesting backdrop to what has happened in our United States to make such thing as Elsa Newman's situation possible--and her children's situation possible.

Vaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates
by MoreRockin on Jan.18, 2009, under Health

Mike Adams
Natural News
Sun, 18 Jan 2009


Think U.S. health authorities have never conducted outrageous medical experiments on children, women, minorities, homosexuals and inmates? Think again: This timeline, originally put together by Dani Veracity (a NaturalNews reporter), has been edited and updated with recent vaccination experimentation programs in Maryland and New Jersey. Here’s what’s really happening in the United States when it comes to exploiting the public for medical experimentation:
(1845 - 1849)

J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

(1895)

New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (”Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After“).

(1896)

Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

(1906)

Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1911)

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (”Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War”).

(1913)

Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (”Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

(1915)

Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1932)

(1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).

(1939)

In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous “Monster Experiment” on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, “in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career” (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

(1941)

Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science” (Sharav).

An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent’s angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).

Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic “cocktails” including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).

(1942)

The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don’t realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test “U.S. Navy summer clothes” (Goliszek).

Merck Pharmaceuticals President George Merck is named director of the War Research Service (WRS), an agency designed to oversee the establishment of a biological warfare program (Goliszek).

(1944 - 1946)

A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride’s central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: “Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect … It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor … Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure.” The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride’s effects (Griffiths and Bryson).

The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University’s teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).

(1945)

Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital (Sharav).

The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States (”Project Paperclip”).

(1945 - 1955)

In Newburgh, N.Y., researchers linked to the Manhattan Project begin the most extensive American study ever done on the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946)

Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride’s effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed “Program F.” With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946 - 1947)

University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).

Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).

Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as “investigations” or “observations” in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).

The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).

(1947)

Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that “certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract” (Goliszek).

A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits,” revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).

The CIA begins studying LSD’s potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).

(1947 - 1953)

The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called “truth serums,” such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).

(1948)

Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1950)

(1950 - 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek).

Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis to study the disease (Sharav).

Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).

Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on Canadians, publishes an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine, in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba’s Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to 200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats their internal body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).

(1951)

The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.’s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1951 - 1956)

Under contract with the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on cancer patients — many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to sources — in order to determine both radiation’s ability to treat cancer and the possible long-term radiation effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until 1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year. The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions — Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine — until 1971 (U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).

American, Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal about Communist “thought-control techniques.” They proposed a top-secret research program on behavior modification — involving testing drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (Barker).

(1952)

At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (Merritte, et al.).

(1953 - 1974)

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women’s aborted embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female newborns under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131 either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the concentration of iodine in the newborns’ thyroid glands (Goliszek).

As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy infants at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants’ thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).

(1953 - 1957)

Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads of iodine-131 (Goliszek).

Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital (452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled to dangerous levels (Goliszek, Sharav).

A 1953 article in Clinical Science describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the skin (Goliszek).

The AEC performs a series of field tests known as “Green Run,” dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford, Wash. site — 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).

(1955 - 1957)

In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).

(1956 - 1957)

U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the insects’ ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities’ residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1957)

The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob’s Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield (”Operation Plumbbob”, Goliszek).

(1957 - 1964)

As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his “psychic driving” concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one’s memory and rewriting the psyche. These “driving” experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to “rewrite” the “erased” psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron’s test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, “Donald Ewan Cameron”).

In order to study how blood flows through children’s brains, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child’s femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).

(1958)

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename “Project Chariot” (Sharav).

(1961)

In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question “Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give “learners” electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of “shocks,” even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain (”Milgram Experiment”).

(1962)

Researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).

The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug’s toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (Sharav).

(1963)

Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving “some cells,” but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn’t obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation’s effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).

(1963 - 1966)

New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).

(1963 - 1971)

Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (Sharav, Goliszek).

Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (Greger).

In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California’s Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns’ umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns’ feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).

(1964 - 1967)

The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin — a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange — and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage (Kaye).

(1965)

As part of a test codenamed “Big Tom,” the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii’s most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time (Goliszek, Martin).

(1966)

U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians, including women and children, to the bacteria (Goliszek).

(1967)

The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses (Goliszek).

The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates’ faces and backs, so as to, in Professor Kligman’s words, “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process,” information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (Kaye).

Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (Kaye).

Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison’s special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).

(1968)

Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (Sharav, Sauter).

(1969)

Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga., without any institutional approval whatsoever (Sharav).

Judge Sam Steinfield’s dissent in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (Sharav).

(1970)

Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University’s permission (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

(1971)

Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The “guards” had begun to act sadistic, while the “prisoners” started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).

An article entitled “Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States” appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV (Goliszek).

(1973)

An Ad Hoc Advisory Panel issues its Final Report on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, writing, “Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific community” (Sharav).

(1977)

The National Urban League holds its National Conference on Human Experimentation, stating, “We don’t want to kill science but we don’t want science to kill, mangle and abuse us” (Sharav).

(1978)

The CDC begins experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine’s infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and then developed it in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that HIV originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans via this vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, Mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes virus among New York’s homosexual community — diseases not usually seen among young, American men, but that would later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS (Goliszek).

(1980)

According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).

(1981)

The CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26 cases of the disease — all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles — again supporting the speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).

(1982)

Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC’s hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

(1985)

A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent (Merritte, et al..)

(1987)

Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son’s brain post mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of “implied consent,” meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied (Merritte, et al.).

(1988)

(1988 - 2001) The New York City Administration for Children’s Services begins allowing foster care children living in about two dozen children’s homes to be used in National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) experimental AIDS drug trials. These children — totaling 465 by the program’s end — experience serious side effects, including inability to walk, diarrhea, vomiting, swollen joints and cramps. Children’s home employees are unaware that they are giving the HIV-infected children experimental drugs, rather than standard AIDS treatments (New York City ACS, Doran).

(1990)

The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War (”Desert Storm”). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome — symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems — affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).

The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an “experimental” measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).

The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield (Sharav).
(1992)

Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males — mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents — 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys ‘R’ Us gift certificate (Goliszek).

(1994)

President Clinton appoints the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which finally reveals the horrific experiments conducted during the Cold War era in its ACHRE Report.

(1995)

A 19-year-old University of Rochester student named Nicole Wan dies from participating in an MIT-sponsored experiment that tests airborne pollutant chemicals on humans. The experiment pays $150 to human test subjects (Sharav).

In the Mar. 15 President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed, hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped during CIA experiments.
These sworn statements include:

Christina DeNicola’s statement that, in Tucson, Ariz., from 1966 to 1976, “Dr. B” performed mind control experiments using drugs, post-hypnotic injection and drama, and irradiation experiments on her neck, throat, chest and uterus. She was only four years old when the experiments started.

Claudia Mullen’s testimony that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (of MKULTRA fame) used chemicals, radiation, hypnosis, drugs, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, electric shock, brainwashing and emotional, sexual and verbal abuse as part of mind control experiments that had the ultimate objective of turning her, who was only a child at the time, into the “perfect spy.” She tells the advisory committee that researchers justified this abuse by telling her that she was serving her country “in their bold effort to fight Communism.”

Suzanne Starr’s statement that “a physician, who was retired from the military, got children from the mountains of Colorado for experiments.” She says she was one of those children and that she was the victim of experiments involving environmental deprivation to the point of forced psychosis, spin programming, injections, rape and frequent electroshock and mind control sessions. “I have fought self-destructive programmed messages to kill myself, and I know what a programmed message is, and I don’t act on them,” she tells the advisory committee of the experiments’ long-lasting effects, even in her adulthood (Goliszek).

President Clinton publicly apologizes to the thousands of people who were victims of MKULTRA and other mind-control experimental programs (Sharav).

President Clinton appoints the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

Justice Edward Greenfield of the New York State Supreme Court rules that parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated children for non-therapeutic medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (Sharav).

(1996)

Professor Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on the unethical use of veterans in medical research to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Governmental Affairs, stating: “This type of research is on-going nationwide in medical centers and VA hospitals supported by tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers money. These experiments are high risk and are abusive, causing not only physical and psychic harm to the most vulnerable groups but also degrading our society’s system of basic human values. Probably tens of thousands of patients are being subjected to such experiments” (”Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.”).

The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (Merritte, et al.).

President Clinton issues a formal apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families (Sharav).

(1997)

In an experiment sponsored by the U.S. government, researchers withhold medical treatment from HIV-positive African-American pregnant women, giving them a placebo rather than AIDS medication (Sharav).

On Sept. 18, victims of unethical medical experiments at major U.S. research centers, including the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) testify before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

(1999)

Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D. testifies on “The Unethical Use of Human Beings in High-Risk Research Experiments” before the U.S. House of Representatives’ House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, alerting the House on the use of American veterans in VA Hospitals as human guinea pigs and calling for national reforms (”Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.”).

Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania inject 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger with an experimental gene therapy as part of an FDA-approved clinical trial. He dies four days later and his father suspects that he was not fully informed of the experiment’s risk (Goliszek)

During a clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of Propulsid for infant acid reflux, nine-month-old Gage Stevens dies at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh (Sharav).

(2000)

The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate — a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses — every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful effects of a water pollutant and is “inherently unethical,” according to Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek, Envirnomental Working Group).

(2001)

On its website, the FDA admits that its policy to include healthy children in human experiments “has led to an increasing number of proposals for studies of safety and pharmacokinetics, including those in children who do not have the condition for which the drug is intended” (Goliszek).

In Higgins and Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute The Maryland Court of Appeals makes a landmark decision regarding the use of children as test subjects, prohibiting non-therapeutic experimentation on children on the basis of “best interest of the individual child” (Sharav).

(2002)

President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects (Hammer Breslow).

(2003)

Two-year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware dies of congestive heart failure. After his death, his parents learn that doctors had performed an experimental surgery on him when he was five months old, rather than using the established surgical method of repairing his congenital heart defect that the parents had been told would be performed. The established procedure has a 90- to 95-percent success rate, whereas the inventor of the procedure performed on baby Daddio would later be fired from his hospital in 2004 (Willen and Evans, “Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren’t Warned”).

(2004)

In his BBC documentary “Guinea Pig Kids” and BBC News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his belief, present times (Doran).

(2005)

In response to the BBC documentary and article “Guinea Pig Kids”, the New York City Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) sends out an Apr. 22 press release admitting that foster care children were used in experimental AIDS drug trials, but says that the last trial took place in 2001 and thus the trials are not continuing, as BBC reporter Jamie Doran claims. The ACS gives the extent and statistics of the experimental drug trials, based on its own records, and contracts the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct “an independent review of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s and 1990s” (New York City ACS).

Bloomberg releases a series of reports suggesting that SFBC, the largest experimental drug testing center of its time, exploits immigrant and other low-income test subjects and runs tests with limited credibility due to violations of both the FDA’s and SFBC’s own testing guidelines (Bloomberg).

In October 2005, the American Chemistry Council gave the EPA $2.1 million to study how children ranging from infancy to three years old ingest, inhale or absorb chemicals. Like IG Farben was for the German pharmaceutical companies of Nazi Germany, the American Chemistry Council acts much like a front group for chemical industry bigwigs like Bayer (which was incidentally also a member of IG Farben), BP, Chevron, Dow, DuPont, Exxon, Honeywell, 3M, Monsanto and Procter & Gamble. Studies have already proven that the chemicals made by these companies have long-term effects on children and adults. A short, two-year study like CHEERS would of course fail to reveal these long-term effects and the American Chemistry Council could then publicize these findings as “proof” that its chemicals were safe.

2006 - 2007

Merck begins pushing U.S. states to mandate the vaccination of teenage girls with Gardasil, a vaccine they claim prevents HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus. In February 2007, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who was revealed to have financial ties with Merck, the vaccine manufacturer — mandates the vaccine in teenage girls (see http://www.NaturalNews.com/021572.html ). A key Merck lobbyist named Mike Toomey, it turned out, had served as Gov. Rick Perry’s chief of staff.

The Texas decision to mandate the vaccine was a notable and troubling milestone in public health policy because it is the first time a vaccine is mandated for a disease that cannot be contracted through casual contact in public schools. It also invoked “gunpoint medicine,” or the threat of arrest at gunpoint for not agreeing to receive state-mandated injections.

The Gardasil vaccinations remain a grand medical experiment being performed on children because it is not yet known what the long-term side effects of the vaccination will be, nor whether the vaccinations will actually lower rates of cervical cancer as intended.

2007

Maryland’s governor and public health officials, fed up with the unwillingness of over 2,000 parents to have their children vaccinated, invoke gunpoint medicine yet again by threatening the parents with arrest and up to 30 days of imprisonment if they don’t submit their children to state-mandated vaccinations. The children and parents are later rounded up at a county courthouse, guarded by attack dogs and security personnel, while a district Judge oversees the mass injection of schoolchildren with vaccines that contain toxic mercury. (See here)

Present day: New Jersey mandates the mass vaccination of all children with four different vaccines, stripping away the health freedoms of parents and unleashing a mass medical experiment that exploits the bodies of children and enriches pharmaceutical companies while criminalizing parents who refuse to participate.

http://eyesonthelies.com/2009/01/18/vaccines-and-medical-experiments-on-children-minorities-woman-and-inmates/

Well...I know this doesn't all relate directly to Newman and her sons, but it's the background that I want people to observe now. Where are we going in this country? What is happening to justice? Why are women like Elsa Newman in prison, although they are innocent? Why are children court-ordered into the custody of their abusers? Is there something more going on in the way of experimentation?

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More Stats from the Statisticians

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding the concept, closely adhered to by some people, which says that if someone is in prison, they must have done SOMETHING wrong.

I often ask myself, "Why do folks have such a hard time believing I have actually found a woman who is innocent and in prison?"

The above concept, of course, is the answer to my question. Americans want to trust our "justice" system. But our "justice" system has proven itself unworthy of our trust.

The Innocence Project clearly shows this in the number of Death Row inmates who have been released...vindicated...proven innocent, although they may have spent literally years in prison, victims of a "guilty" verdict by a jury of their peers.

There is clearly something wrong here.

Another place where something is wrong is in the matter of gender bias in courts which place victimized, molested and/or abused children in the hands of their abusers, molesters and exploiters. And at the same time, mothers who try to protect their children are punished by the courts, right up to and including imprisonment, even though these mothers are guilty of only one crime: they have tried to protect their children.

When I came across the following blog entry, I decided to post it here to demonstrate what I have been saying: There are hundreds of innocent people in American prisons today. Only God knows how many of them.

Take a look at this, if you will:

Grits for Breakfast: Estimating false convictions: Thousands of Texas
prisoners are likely innocent--http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com

Grits for Breakfast
Welcome to Texas justice: You might beat the rap, but you won't beat
the
ride.
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Estimating false convictions: Thousands of Texas prisoners are likely
innocent

The string of DNA exonerations witnessed in recent years has made
everyone
in the justice system aware that more innocent people are convicted of
crimes than anyone previously thought. But what percentage of total
convictions are false ones?

This is a difficult question because it's hard to find an accurate
denominator for comparison.

Nobody thinks every innocent person has been identified through DNA
testing,
and indeed no biological evidence exists to test in the vast majority
of
criminal cases. So even though we know 39 Texans have been exonerated
by
DNA, we don't know what percentage of criminal convictions overall are
false.

One of the few datasets that generates a statistically viable
denominator
comes from capital murder cases, for which a new study from Michigan
State
provides a new, national calculation:

Among defendants sentenced to death in the United States since 1973,
at
least 2.3 percentâ€"and possibly moreâ€"were falsely convicted, said U-
M law
professor Samuel Gross in a study co-authored by Barbara O'Brien, a
professor at Michigan State University College of Law.

If defendants who were sentenced to prison had been freed because of
innocence at the same rate as those who were sentenced to death,
there would
have been nearly 87,000 non-death row exonerations in the United
States from
1989 through 2003, rather than the 266 that were reported, the study
said.

"The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations of falsely
convicted defendants is that there are many other false convictions
that we
have not discovered," said Gross, whose research has focused on the
death
penalty, false convictions and eyewitness identification.

Since 1989, nearly all exonerations in the United States fall into
three
categories: rape convictions, because of post-conviction DNA testing;
murder
convictions, and especially death sentences, which are subjected to
much
more detailed post-conviction reinvestigation than other convictions;
and a
few groups of false drug and gun possession convictions that were
produced
by concerted programs of police perjury that later unraveled.

As result, researchers know little about false convictions among
crimes of
violence other than murder or rape, even though false convictions for
robbery could greatly outnumber those for rape and murder. And
researchers
know next to nothing about false convictions for other types of
crimes, such
as property crimes, misdemeanors and white collar crimes.
The exoneration rate in Texas for capital murder convictions is
slightly
lower than in this national study.

Another dataset that lends itself to statistically valid innocence
estimates
come from DNA exonerations. In Texas, 3.3% of cases solved by DNA
evidence
resulted in exonerating convicted defendants.

So let's guess that the false conviction rate in Texas is somewhere
between
2.3-3.3%: With around 155,000 prisoners, that would mean between
3,500 and
5,000 or so current Texas prison inmates were falsely convicted.

Another 10-15,000 falsely convicted people are on the probation
rolls, this
data implies - perhaps even more since innocent people may be more
likely to
accept a plea for probation than risk incarceration for something they
didn't do.

Scott Henson, 603 W. 13th Street, Ste. 1.A-253, Austin, TX 78701-1477

"Scott Henson ... writes his terrific blog Grits for Breakfast from an
outhouse in Texas."
- To the People

Who is more likely to have abused/molested/exploited a child? His father or his mother?

Male versus Female: who is more likely to perpetrate child abuse

Since I'm not good at working out my own math in a situation like this, I turn to what others have done. I am able to follow this line of reasoning, and I do hope some of my readers will follow it as well.

(When doing the math, adjust the figures as your actual study shows them.)
Assume that at any given time, 90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual (not "constructive") physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)

Assume that when a couple together are caring for children (e.g. married parents, grandparents, or a parent and stepparent), if the man perpetrates abuse it's extremely unlikely that the woman also will not be charged with either accomplice physical abuse or failure to protect (neglect), so these statistics are a "wash" and we are not considering them. (In reality, it's next to never that men are charged for abuse perpetrated by a woman when there is a couple caring for a child, Rusty Yates case in point, but this anomaly favors men and artificially increases the relative portion of total abuse reported as being perpetrated by women, so we will err in that direction. We also are ignoring "gang" abuse and other kinds of individual incidents of reported abuse involving two or more non-coupled adults against children, which are, at any rate, relatively rare.)

Note that each counted incident of reported abuse is per occurrence per child, and not per perpetrator. (So that, e.g. one woman caring for 4 kids who didn't send them to school or didn't take them to the dentist when she should have in the opinion of some DCF worker is responsible for four reported counts of neglect-type abuse "perpetrated by a woman," whereas one man's rape of one child would be one count of abuse in the reported statistics.)

Assume that per caregiver, when they do care for children, women on average care for 2 children while men care for 1 child. (Women are much more likely than men are to care for groups of children rather than one child, and even when men do care for more than one child at a time, women are much more likely to care for large groups, both in a parental capacity in families in which there are more children as well as third party caregiving.)

Assume that for every 80 women who routinely directly care for children alone and spend significant time with them, there are 20 men who directly care for children alone and spend significant time with them. Thus, in the population of all persons who routinely care for children on their own, of every 100 persons, 80 are women and 20 are men, or put another way, there are 4 women caregivers for each 1 man caregiver. (Do not confuse this statistical base with the 90% children figure, above, which reflects individual women caring for more than one child at a time. If you are surprised at this 80-20 figure, and assumed it should be closer to 50-50, thinking of "parents," remember that children in the active care of a couple together are being statistically eliminated as a wash -- a simplification that in these calculations will err in favor of men -- and also don't forget the vast numbers of unwed and divorced mothers who care for children without male assistance, the stepmothers who care for children while fathers are away or at work, and the sex of third party caregivers.)

Assume (without regard to kind of abuse, and without correcting for qualitative differences by removing or differentiating add-on and minor neglect charges from affirmative acts of physical abuse), that counting reported incidents of abuse shows that 70% of all incidents of abuse were committed by women and 30% were committed by men. (This is grossly skewed to err in favor of men, see below.)

Set up a ratio to compare men- versus women-perpetrated abuse. Thus:
Based on the foregoing, women abusers occur at a comparative rate of 70/80 in the population where the numerator is percent of incidents of abuse, and the denominator is total woman population caring for children; and men abusers occur at a comparative rate of 30/20 in the population where the numerator is percent of incidents of abuse, and the denominator is total man population caring for children, or, in order to more easily compare this ratio with the woman abuser ratio, making the denominators equal, 120/80.

The total abuse would be 120 + 70, or 190. Therefore, in any given population of child caregivers, adjusted to reflect greater likelihood of women being the caregiver, men represent 120/190 of total incidents of abuse perpetrated and women represent 70/190 of that total. The comparative likelihood that a man is the abuser then is represented as .63, and that a woman is the abuser as .36.

In other words, using these conservative figures, and without yet correcting for the fact that for each woman caregiver there are more children and without recognizing different kinds of abuse, in the population of all caregivers, men are nearly twice as likely to abuse children as are women.

Now adjust for actual numbers of perpetrators.

The incidents of abuse in women's 70/80 above ratio actually represent only 35 individual women caregivers (because each woman is caring for an average 2 children.) The incidents of abuse in men's 30/20 ratio above represent 30 man caregivers (because, above, they have an average of 1 child to care for compared with 2 children cared for by a women.) Because we are looking to compare perpetrator information gleaned from statistics using incident reports for each child, a different statistical population base, we need to adjust for this.
Based on the foregoing, then, individual women perpetrators actually will be represented by a ratio of 35/80 and men perpetrators will occur with a comparable frequency of 30/20, or, adjusting the denominators so that we can better compare the ratios for women and men, we have a ratio of 120/80 for men compared with 35/80 for women. Individual men then represent 120/155 of total individual abusers, and women are 35/155 of total individual abusers.

Thus, the adjusted likelihood that a man is an abuser is .77, and that a woman is an abuser is .23. In other words, the "twice as likely" calculation was premature; individual men caregivers are 2.34 times more likely (or 3.34 times as likely) as a woman is to be an abuser.

Compare the above two calculations with the National Clearinghouse statistics that "[a]mong children in single-parent households, those living with only their fathers were approximately one and two-thirds times more likely to be physically abused than those living with only their mothers."

Now adjust again to take into account time and opportunity.

While we cannot say that if an abuser cares for a child for more time, it's more likely that abuse will be perpetrated by that abuser, it does seem reasonable to suppose that it has some effect. The assumed fact, above, is that any given time 90% of children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the care of a woman, or stated another way, women are performing 90% of child care once children in the care of couples are eliminated from consideration (the statistical wash.) If there is a direct correlation, and if men perpetrate 30% of child abuse, then men perpetrate abuse 30/10 of the time, and women perpetrate abuse 70/90. Adjusting the denominators, per time men are caring for children, we get a whopping 270/90 for men. That makes men 3.86 times as likely as women to perpetrate abuse given the same amount of time in caregiving. If we now correct this figure to adjust for actual numbers of individual caregivers this represents, remembering that there are, mathematically, 4 women caregivers (above) for every 1 man caregiver, we also properly should adjust the time/opportunity ratios to account for that.
So per individual, men abusers are represented by a risk ratio of 1080/90 compared with women who are 70/90.

So what we have calculated thus far is that, IF, according to incident reports, 70% of all child abuse is committed by women, then adjusting for the different statistical populations and applying our stated assumptions, men are 12 times as likely as women to perpetrate abuse against children, or put another way, they are 1100% more dangerous to children than are women.

However, this calculation still errs on the side of being too conservative. We haven't corrected for kind of abuse, or seriousness of outcomes.

In addition, the raw figures actually don't show that 70% of all incidents of child abuse are perpetrated by women -- even when including reported "abuse" such as accomplice abuse, failure to protect, and minor neglect such as leaving a child unattended where no harm has occurred. They don't show that.

The statistics you will see from, e.g. the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect show that child abuse perpetrated by women represents (depending on report) between 50-70% of total abuse, usually closer to 50%. And if we remove from those reports, those minor neglect charges without notable outcomes and charges such as "failure to protect" that women -- and notably battered women -- but very few men tend to be charged with, we probably come down to something closer to 50-50, if it is even that much, if indeed women are the perpetrators of even 50% of total numbers of real abuse and neglect. Which means that in reality, men are not "12 times as likely as women to perpetrate child abuse" but some multiplier significantly greater even than that. In other words:

Children are at astronomically greater risk of physical abuse in the care of a man than in the care of a woman.

Article taken from The Liz Library

Why Might a Victim Side with His Molester?

The source for this information is SECASA. For further information about the source, please see the copyright notice at the end of this entry.

I must admit here, in front of God and everybody, that I have been confounded by one main question in the Elsa Newman case: in a situation where a mother has tried to protect her children from a father about whom those children disclosed sexual molestation and other abuses, why on earth would the child dismiss the mother as “crazy” and “a hole I crawled out of”—and end up taking the side of his abuser?

Internet research brought me to this site, which contains a wealth of information on that precise question.

Any one of these effects could, it seems—in and of itself—cause a child to side with a molester. Combine them all? And you have a set of effects that might cause horrendous problems for even the staunchest and strongest of human beings of any age.

With this introduction, I leave you to the results of my research. I hope you have time to read it. It certainly offers an explanation for the confounded question that has left me confounded!

THE EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE:

· Psychological Effects
· Long Term Effects
· The Child Abuse Accomodation Syndrome
· Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
· The Stockholm Syndrome

Psychological Effects
1. Fear. The offender may swear the child to secrecy and say that if they tell something bad will happen. Sexual abuse is usually accompanied by coercion, bribery or threats. The child is afraid to tell because of what the consequences might be. e.g. punishment, blame, abandonment or not being believed.
2. Helplessness/powerlessness. Children in this situation often feel that they have no control over their own lives or even over their own bodies. They feel that they have no choices available to them.
3. Guilt and Shame. The child knows something is wrong and blames him or herself not others. The offender will often encourage the child to feel that the abuse is his or her fault and sometimes s/he will feel that s/he is a "bad" person.
4. Responsibility. The offender often makes the child feel responsible for keeping the abuse a secret. Sometimes the child also feels responsible for keeping the family together and the burden of this responsibility interferes with experiencing a normal childhood.
5. Isolation. Incest victims feel different from other children. They must usually be secretive. This even isolates them from non-offending parents and brothers and sisters.
6. Betrayal. Children feel betrayed because they are dependent upon adults for nurturing and protection and the offender is someone who they should be able to love and trust. They may also feel betrayed by a non-offending parent who they feel has failed to protect them.
7. Anger. Not surprisingly this is one of the strongest feelings which many children have about their sexual assault. Children may feel anger against the perpetrator and also against others who they feel failed to protect them.
8. Sadness. Children may feel grief due to a sense of loss, especially if the perpetrator was loved and trusted by the child.
9. Flashbacks. These can be like nightmares which happen while the child is awake. They are a re-experience of the sexual assault and the child may experience all the feelings again which they felt at the time.

In The Long Term The Child May Also Experience A Number Of Effects As An Adult. These May Include:

1. Depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping.
2. Low self esteem.
3. "Damaged goods" syndrome. i.e. negative body image due to self-blame. This may be intensified if physical pain was experienced during the abusive incidents.
4. Dissociation from feeling.
5. Social isolation.
6. Relationship problems such as an inability to trust, poor social skills or a reluctance to disclose details about themselves.
7. Self destructive behaviour such as substance abuse or suicide attempts.
8. Sexual difficulties such as fear of sex or intimacy, indiscriminate multiple sex partners or difficulty in reaching orgasm.
9. Parenting problems such as fear of being a bad parent, or fear of abusing the child or being overprotective.
10. An underlying sense of guilt, anger or loss.
11. "Flashbacks" and/or panic attacks.

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome was developed by Roland Summit, M.D. It is a simple and logical model which can be used to help in understanding and accepting the ways in which many children react to sexual abuse. The syndrome classifies the most typical reactions of child sexual abuse victims, dividing them into five categories.

It is worth noting that children are often put through a "grooming process" before the sexual abuse commences. They are initially chosen for being compliant and therefore unlikely to complain or tell anyone. The offender may then go to considerable lengths to build up the child's trust, for example the child may be given presents or told that they are "special".

The five categories of the syndrome are:

1. Secrecy.
Abused children tend to keep the abuse a secret. They do so for a variety of reasons. They may be afraid of the abuser who may have threatened the child or someone whom the child loves. Physically abused children may be afraid of being beaten again. The abuser may have promised safety to the child or child's loved ones if the child keeps quiet. Neglected or emotionally abused children long for their parents' approval and affection - they may keep silent for fear of losing the parents' love.
2. Helplessness.
Children are inherently helpless and subordinate. They are small, dependent, and emotionally immature. For all of these reasons, they cannot escape from a dangerous situation. Children who try to protect themselves are usually overridden by more powerful adults. When their attempts to protect themselves fail, these children come to believe that they are helpless. Eventually they stop trying to protect themselves overtly. Instead they may withdraw, go physically limp or dissociate.*
* "Dissociation" is a way in which some children survive abuse by escaping mentally while the abuse is happening. The body and the mind seem to separate. While the body is being hurt, the child no longer feels it because the mind manages to escape to a safe place. Different children may dissociate in different ways. One example is "leaving" the body and floating on the ceiling over the bed where the abuse is occurring. The child may even watch what is happening but it is as if it were happening to someone else. The child feels nothing.
3. Entrapment And Accommodation.
Children who keep their abuse a secret and continue to feel helpless inevitably feel trapped. However, they learn to accept the situation and survive. The helpless child faced with continuing victimisation must learn to somehow achieve a sense of power and control. The child may eventually come to blame him or herself, believing s/he has provoked the abuse. Physically abused children may refer to their bad behaviours as reasons why their parents must punish them. Emotionally abused or neglected children may imagine unacceptable traits in themselves. Physically, sexually and emotionally abused children may also employ defensive mechanisms (e.g. dissociation or blocking out the memory) in an attempt to accommodate to the abuse.
4. Delayed, Conflicted And Unconvincing Disclosure.
Adults who ask a child to disclose abuse must recognise that this request may precipitate an acute crisis for the child. Initial disclosures may be fraught with anxiety, retractions and inconsistencies. Therefore it may sound unconvincing. Because the child has used various defensive mechanisms to cope with the abuse, memory may be fragmentary, perceptions may be altered and information may be scattered and sparse.
5. Retraction.
Children who do disclose abuse may be flooded with guilt, fear and feelings of betrayal or confusion. The adults' immediate responses may frighten them further. For example, the child may be removed into foster care, the parent may be put in prison and members of the child's family may suffer. All this may make the child retract the disclosure. Children gravitate towards the safety of a familiar situation, no matter how painful it is. Most abused or neglected children remain loyal to their families and, if given a choice, frequently want to stay with their abusive parents.
It should be noted that this is a "model" describing reactions, not an absolute. Like all models it does not mean each child will show all aspects of this syndrome. There have been some problems reported in the U.S. with courts taking the model so literally that if children don't demonstrate all the features they are under suspicion of lying.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is used by psychologists and psychiatrists as a framework for the treatment of sexually abused children. It is valuable in identifying the existence of specific behaviours that should be addressed in therapy. PTSD describes symptoms which are characteristic in many cases of sexual abuse but it is important to note that it does not apply to all sexually abused children. PTSD can sometimes appear many years after the original event. A diagnosis of PTSD is often used in court reports e.g. for applications for Criminal Injuries Compensation. The criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD are:
1. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.
2. The re-experiencing of the trauma in at least one of the following ways:
a. Recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event.
b. Recurrent distressing dreams of the event.
c. Sudden acting or feeling as if the event were recurring e.g. "flashback" episodes, hallucinations, illusions.
d. Intense psychological distress at exposure to events that symbolise or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
3. A numbing of responsiveness or reduced involvement in the external world some time after the trauma, indicated by:
a. Diminished interest in activities and/or
b. Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others and/or
c. Constricted affect e.g. unable to have loving feelings or to feel anger.
4. In addition, at least two of the following sets of symptoms must be present:
a. Hyperalertness or being easily startled.
b. Sleep problems.
c. Guilt about surviving or behaviour required to survive.
d. Problems with memory or concentration.
e. Avoidance of activities that arouse recollection.
f. Intensification of symptoms if events symbolise or resemble the traumatic event.

The Stockholm Syndrome
The Stockholm Syndrome was originally developed to explain the phenomenon of hostages bonding with their captors. The name refers to a bank holdup in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973 when four people were held hostage for six days by two men. The hostages and their captors bonded with each other and the hostages actually came to see their captors as protecting them from the police. One was even reported as later becoming engaged to one of the captors.
Subsequent research found that such a reaction had occurred in allthe "hostage" groups studied, including cult members, battered women, incest victims and physically or emotionally abused children. Researchers have concluded that this seems to be a universal phenomenon which may be instinctive and thus play a survival function for hostages who are victims of abuse.

There is no universally accepted definition of the Stockholm Syndrome but it has been suggested that it is present if one or more of the following is observed:
a. positive feelings by the captive towards his/her captor.
b. negative feelings by the captive toward the police or authorities trying to win his/her release.
c. positive feelings by the captor towards his/her captive.

It has been found to occur in circumstances where there is:
a. a perceived threat to survival and a belief that the captor is willing to carry out that threat.
b. a perception by the captive of some small kindness from the captor within the context of terror.
c. isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor.
d. perceived inability to escape.
The following explanation has been put forward for the phenomenon.
The abuser (or captor) terrifies the victim, who cannot escape, by threatening his or her physical or psychological survival. As a result of being terrified the victim needs nurturance and protection. Being isolated from others, the victim must turn to the abuser for this if s/he turns to anyone. If the abuser shows the victim some small kindness this creates hope in the victim, who then ignores her rage at the terror-creating side of the abuser (because this rage would be experienced as overwhelming) and bonds to the positive side of the abuser. With the hope that the abuser will let him or her live, the victim works to keep the abuser happy. In trying to determine what will keep the abuser happy, the victim's own needs, feelings and perspectives must take second place and s/he unconsciously takes on the world view of the abuser. The victim sees the abuser as the "good guy" and those trying to win his/her release (e.g. police or therapists) as the "bad guys", as this is the way the abuser sees things. Over a period of months or years, the victim's entire sense of self may come to be experienced through the eyes of the abuser. The victim may have extreme difficulty leaving the abuser, if the opportunity arises, because s/he no longer sees a reason to do so.
For victims of sexual abuse, their families and therapists, the Stockholm Syndrome is useful in explaining the victim's experiences, current "symptoms" and the relationship between victim and abuser. It can help remove the tendency of the victim to blame him or herself for "allowing" the abuse to continue or for "causing" the abuse. It can also help to make sense of the ways in which the victim's perceptions of themselves and the abuser can be distorted, by explaining those distortions in terms of the Syndrome and making clear their origins as an instinctive survival function.

The following are some common ways in which the victim's view of their situation can become distorted, with the corresponding explanations in terms of the Stockholm Syndrome:
a. The victim denies the abuser's violence against him/her and focuses on his positive side.
o Explanation: An unconscious attempt to find hope (and thus a way to survive) in a situation in which s/he would otherwise feel powerless and overwhelmed.
b. The victim feels shame for abuse done to him/her.
o Explanation: Reflects the victim having taken the abuser's perspective (namely, that s/he caused the abuse and therefore it was deserved).
c. The victim resents outsiders' attempts to free him/her from the abuser.
o Explanation: The victim knows that the abuser is likely to retaliate against him/her for any disloyalty shown, so s/he resists others' attempts to free her or to hold the abuser accountable for the abuse.
d. The victim identifies with the "victim" in the abuser.
o Explanation: This represents the projection of the victim's own victim status onto the abuser. It enables the victim to feel sympathetic and caring towards the abuser.
e. The victim believes s/he deserved the abuser's violence.
o Explanation: This represents an attempt to feel that s/he controls when and whether the violence/abuse is done and thus permits him/her to believe s/he can stop the abuse.
f. The victim rationalises the abuser's violence against him/her.
o Explanation: An attempt to maintain a bond with the abuser (and thus hope of survival) in the face of behaviour (abuse) that would otherwise destroy that bond (hope).
g. Victim uses abuser-as-victim explanation to account for the abuse.
o Explanation: This represents an effort to see the abuser in a positive light so as to maintain the bond (since the bond provides the victim with the only hope of surviving).
h. The victim feels hatred for that part of him/her which the abuser said led to the abuse.
o Explanation: To improve chances of survival, the victim internalises the abuser's perspective, including the reasons given for the abuse.
i. The victim fears the abuser will come to get him/her, even if he is dead or in prison.
o Explanation: The victim knows the abuser is willing to "get" him/her because he has done so at least once before. The victim remains loyal in anticipation of his return.

Copyright is owned by SECASAEnquiries should be addressed to SECASA on 61 3 9928 8741 or via email at secasa@southernhealth.org.au